Despite the extravagant lifestyle, enormous sums of money, fancy suits, and major development projects, the real estate investment industry still operates behind the scenes in an archaic fashion, cluttered with complicated Excel sheets and exhaustingly long back-and-forth emails. A new Israeli startup called Agora, developer of a more modern and updated tool for real estate investment management, announced an $890k Seed funding round from Sarona Partners, LA Fusion, Maccabee Ventures, and private investors.

A platform for real estate investors to erase Excel sheets from their process

Agora provides investors with a comprehensive dashboard that organizes an investor’s portfolio all onto one platform. Just by clicking on one of the projects or assets displays all details related to said asset, as well as categorizing important documents that may be required or attached. All the documents are backed up in the cloud and the system also enables users digital signature options.

This comes as yet another digitized solution gaining urgency following the global COVID crisis, as CEO Bar Mor sheds more light on the impact of pandemic reality on Agora’s market: “Especially in times like these of uncertainty, companies understand that they must become more efficient in order to save costs, and more importantly, they have to provide their investors with transparency and control over their investments in order to maintain their confidence and trust. And so, even though the real estate market has slowed down, we are actually seeing an increase in traction.”

For real estate investment companies there is a dedicated dashboard for managing asset investments. In the asset portal, users can find all the key details of every asset, as well as automate asset reports to each investor. The investor portal provides detailed insight into each investor, and their related forms. In the document management portal, users can manage all related documents to a certain asset, even sharing the reports with different authorization options. Actually, Agora’s system is a kind of real estate centered CRM that can calculate cost, yield, and other key investment components.

Agora completed the funding round with few key investor names hailing from the Israeli high-tech market: Ran Sarig and Efi Cohen (Datorama founders), Sarit Firon Managing Partner at Team8, Doron Myersdorf (CEO & co-founder of Storedot), and VC backed accelerator for Israeli startups Fusion LA. In addition, Hanan Mor (Bar Mor’s father) of Mor Group, Maccabee Ventures and Sarona Partners also got in on the Seed round.

In a conversation with Geektime, Bar tells that ever since he was young, real estate has been a key part of his life “and I acquired a lot of knowledge and experience in the field.” This doesn’t come as much of a surprise, as Bar’s father is the owner of Mor Group, a public real estate giant.

Mor connected with CPO Lior Dolinski and CTO Noam Kahan to form the company in 2019. Mor explains that the trio served together as unit commanders in the IDF’s elite 8200 unit, and the combination of their combined tech skills with real estate experience, and Mor’s deep connections to the industry, “led to the investor’s vote of confidence in the company.”

The startup is currently part of real estate focused Proptech Zone accelerator program, and currently employs a team of 8 split between the company’s NY and Tel Aviv offices. Among the company’s ‘pride and joy’ clientele is Goldman Investments and Realya Group.

Disclaimer: Sarona Ventures (mentioned above) is also an investor in Geektime.